Wake Forest vs Purdue went to double overtime on Saturday and ended 38-36, and it ended the way so many of these games end now: with the quarterback deciding to stop asking anyone else to do it. Gio Lopez ran three yards for the touchdown in the second overtime, then kept the ball on the two-point conversion that the rulebook demanded of him about forty seconds later. Deacons by two.
That is a cruel and beautiful way to lose a football game. Purdue scored 36 points on the road and got on the bus with nothing.
What happened in Wake Forest vs Purdue in double overtime?
The full box score has not made it to my desk yet, so I am not going to pretend I can walk you through every possession. What I can tell you is the shape of the ending, and the shape is everything. Lopez took it in from the 3. Then, under the current overtime structure, there is no kicking team trotting out for the easy point. You go get two or you hand the ball back and hope your defense is better tired than theirs.
He got two. Game.
Why the college football overtime rule made this a two-point finish
This is the part I think gets underappreciated by people who only check the score. Since the NCAA changed the format ahead of the 2021 season, teams must attempt a two-point conversion after a touchdown beginning in the second overtime, and from the third overtime on it becomes nothing but alternating two-point plays. The idea was to shorten marathon games and protect players from six-overtime slugfests. What it actually did was turn the second overtime into a knife fight at the three-yard line.
checked the almanac: before that rule, this exact sequence would have been an extra point, a 37-36 lead, and probably a third overtime with two exhausted defenses. one rule change, one different ending, one different flight home.
So Lopez did not just score. He had to score twice inside the same drive, essentially, and the second one had no margin in it at all. A quarterback run there is the highest-percentage call in football and also the one that asks the most of the guy making it. He took it anyway. That tells you what the huddle thinks of him, and it tells you what he thinks of himself.
What comes next for Purdue and Wake Forest
For Purdue, a two-point overtime loss is the kind that sits in a building all week. You can watch that tape and find eleven plays that would have flipped it, and every one of them will be true, and none of them will change the number in the standings. Programs trying to climb out of a hole need exactly these games, and this one got away in the smallest possible increment. That is the tax on being close.
For Wake Forest, it is a different week entirely. You do not just bank a nonconference win, you bank the proof that your quarterback will put the season on his own legs when the structure of the game forces somebody to. That travels. Teams remember who was willing.
What I am watching next is the tape on that final conversion: whether it was designed quarterback run all the way or a read that broke down and Lopez decided he was the best option on the field. The answer tells you a lot about how Wake Forest plans to play the rest of this season.